Buddy

Inspiration In an era of information overload, credibility has become a scarce and valuable resource. We asked ourselves: what if there were a small but meaningful incentive for people to genuinely contribute to each other's wellbeing? Could gamification make financial literacy not just accessible, but actually engaging at scale?

What it does CredFinance is a reputation-powered forum where users stake a portion of their credibility score to back their answers to financial questions. The system tracks spending habits and surfaces personalised group challenges, rewarding collaborative participation. A RAG pipeline processes a large corpus of financial documentation so users get relevant, sourced insights without having to wade through hours of research themselves.

How we built it Python backend, Anthropic LLMs powering both the RAG pipeline and the AI advisor, with a React, Next.js, and Tailwind frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Avoiding rate limits while keeping the RAG pipeline responsive was a persistent battle. Netlify kept crashing under load, so we pivoted to an alternative deployment mid-build — not ideal during a hackathon sprint.

Accomplishments we're proud of

We whiteboarded the entire backend architecture on paper and had a working implementation within four hours. Watching the design translate directly into running code was a genuinely satisfying moment.

What we learned

How to embed game design principles into a product people actually want to return to That CI/CD discipline pays off even — especially — under time pressure

What's next for CredFinance

Expanding into underserved markets, starting with international students who face unique financial challenges with limited local support Building infrastructure to support concurrent services at scale

Built With

• nextjs
• python
• react
• tailwind
• typescript